“My Sister’s Sister” was painted 30 years later and shares the same motifs and themes, but its execution is very different. The four sisters sit together, all on their hands and knees, wearing similar long, loose, nondescript dresses, against a subdued colored background. None of the visual information found in “Family Group” exists here. It can be anywhere at any time. The only thing that distinguishes the sisters is their facial features, but they are no less pronounced. Another unifying factor is that the light coming in from the left falls behind the figure sitting on the edge, obliterating the outline of the dress and lying around the head like a halo, illuminating the cheeks of the next figure. It also shines on the last two faces.
The difference between the two photos is striking. They depict the same sisters brought together in the same situation – naturally with the death of a loved one – but in the first paintings the emphasis is on external differences, and the feeling of fellowship comes from within. In the other picture, it is as if the fellowship is marked by external resemblances, the dress, the pose, the light shining on them all. No one is looking at each other. They each sit in her separate world, looking inward. It is, I imagine, an image of grief as a being, grief owning these people, the way grief has always owned people, and the first picture is of a specific situation of grief. And that’s what the people we see are there. If you take a step back and look at more distant photos, there’s one thing they have in common: In both groups, there is no visible conflict, no obvious competition, nothing that no one claims. yourself at the expense of others.
When I first visited Paul and told me about the photographs she was planning to paint, she explained this dynamic, that the group portraits of four artists were similar to the group portraits she painted of sisters. I mentioned how different it is. If friendship existed between artists, there was little competition, envy, egoism and idiosyncrasy.
Like the previous occasion, only a few seconds passed from when I pressed the intercom button until the sound of her voice reached the speakers. And just like before, she accepted me in the hallway with a smile. We chatted for a few minutes about what had happened since then. And then she took me to her studio and showed me her paintings.
There was not just one picture there, but three.
The first was in 1963 when he depicted four painters in a Soho restaurant. However, all details of the photo were eliminated. In the painting, they were seated behind an empty table in an empty room, and they stood very upright side by side. Nothing was happening between them, nothing was happening in front of them, it was just them – Frodo, Bacon, Auerbach, Andrews. All four of them were looking straight out of the picture. The walls behind them were greenish, and the wavy painted table was green in the shadows. The only object left from the photo was a round painting that was hanging on the wall. Here, it resembles a porthole, as if four people are sitting on a ship. All that greenery gave me an underwater feeling. It was not easy to say what kind of world they were in, except that it was not this. They looked at us from the past and saw that sunken world, the realm of the dead.
Directly across from this larger painting, I hung another, newly painted painting. It was a self-portrait, and it was also large, painted on a painter’s smock with colored poles, and a long one of green chaise lying on it. Visually, the smock dominated the image – with every spot of color, it resembled an abstract painting itself – but the emotional center was the face. It was painted with a transparent, coarse brush, typical of Paul’s self-portraits – the head was small, the mouth wide, the hair dark and tight, the face turned towards the viewer. But it was as if the eyes saw the past with something else. They lacked the quality of self-examination that many of her self-portraits have. This was not a naked soul, but something that sat there and let something come to it.
Hanging like this, she was staring at them from this thing, just as Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, and Andrews were staring at Paul from the depths of that lost world. There was a lot of movement in that room. Death, the past, art, longing, it all sends a whirlwind, brought to life by two paintings. The men were pictured in the early 60s, when they saw the height of their careers, and although they are neighbors to each other and practice the same profession, the photo does not radiate a sense of fellowship. Alone there. The passivity of the numbers and the fact that they are lined up in a row made me think of the defendant sitting in the dock. The presence of a self-portrait, the painter sitting back looking at her work, complicates the image. I see her the way Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, and Andrews see her; The distance of her gaze opens up space for the viewer.
The third picture was of a tree, almost bursting into existence.
I looked at these paintings for a long time. They grabbed the room and grabbed me. It wasn’t until I left the studio and went into the kitchen to have some coffee and chat about this that the impressions of the painting slowly dissolved, like I did it for the first time. , the jumble of light, our hands, and the intermittent details of reality, new with every glance. But now, as I write this eight months later, in October 2024, it is the paintings I remember and the feelings they left me with. Of course this is so. Because they painted the past, the painter, the presence of trees and what you were once close to. ♦
(Translated from Norway by Ingvild Burkey.)
This was drawn from “Celia Paul: 1975-2025 Works”.
